Review: FIRST NOVEL by Nicholas Royle

*Does not contain spoilers. Promise.*“You take a leap of the imagination and the momentum of the story, the boldness of the conceit, should take the reader with you” – Nicholas Royle, First Novel The first thing most reviews will clue you in on is the fact that Nicholas Royle’s First Novel isn’t in fact his first novel – it’s his seventh. So he’s done this before, and you can tell. It’s a controlled, eloquent piece of fiction, fascinating to read and skilfully manipulative of our reading experience. First Novel is the kind of playfully meta-fictional, elusive novel that is so difficult to sum up in retrospect. Either it’s a self-referential work of meta-fiction and shrewd look at the attractions of creative writing courses; or it’s a black noirish drama with all the twists of a good crime story; or it’s simply about an unhinged, lonely man who gets his kicks from dogging under passing airplanes. Actually, it’s all these things at once and more. Either the thought of anything ‘meta’ makes your heart beat that little bit faster, or you’ve already tossed it aside as pretentious drivel, but either way, you should give First Novel a chance: it is a work of self-reflective literary skill but it manages to compel you to turn each page with an earnest drive to find out ‘what happens next’. The meta-fictional devices Royle uses, even when they are more overt, are slick and you can take the meta-fictional analysis or leave it. It’s the kind of novel that is impossible to sum up in a few pithy sentences. Essentially, though, First Novel is about Paul Kinder, a creative writing tutor at a University in north-west England. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has also written a first novel, long forgotten and out of print. It quickly becomes apparent that Paul, like most interesting narrators, has more than his fair share of odd quirks and flaws. He has a fetish for collecting white-spined paperbacks and gets his kicks dogging under the sound of passing airplanes. Oh, and he keeps three creepy manikins resembling his wife and children, who have long left him. Alarm bells should be going off. Even at his most dislikeable though, there’s something intriguing and human about Paul that makes you turn the next page. Paul’s is not the only narrative within the novel, though, and it becomes increasingly complicated by other stories and sections of writing. It’s a turbulent novel, frequently unsettling its own narrative stability – you have to navigate more than one strand of narrative road, a road that twists and turns so often you forget to focus on the things passing by the windows. The narrative(s) continually trip you up. Paul spends a lot of time somewhat aimlessly driving around within the novel and it becomes an apt metaphor for the process of reading the book itself. Straight roads with clearly marked signs conceal the obvious things that are so easy to overlook. At one point, his neighbour tells Paul “You’ve not been paying attention” and he’s saying this to the reader too. It’s an interrogation not just of the novel and creative writing, but an interrogation of us – of our lies, our decisions. As the novel hurtles into full gear, moving with dexterity towards its intricately linked together (and yet still ambiguous) ending, I had no idea how it would end or even what narrative I was waiting to finish. Each twist and narrative is unravelled so carefully, that when the curtains go up it’s only at the finale that we can fully appreciate what Royle has done. The ending is like the reveal of the secrets behind a magic trick. Except it doesn’t stop being impressive once we know how it’s done and if (like me) you haven’t quite been paying enough attention, then you’ll probably have to read it again to tease out every narrative strand. This kind of clever playfulness might become tiring but it never does. It’s not an exercise in style (of which First Novel has plenty) over substance; the substance is deep, harrowing and close to the surface. Despite its trickery and skill, it’s a surprisingly honest and compassionate novel and even in its more surreal or far-fetched moments the characters remain sympathetic and believable. “Everything is either or, and inside each either or is another either or, like Russian dolls.” Perhaps mostly, it’s a novel about choices: simple choices like whether to turn left or right, or to tell a lie or a truth. These minor and seemingly insignificant details alter the path of the story – of our story. We’ll miss that if we’re not paying attention. The blurb on the back of the novel reads ‘Either you’ll get it, or you won’t’. I’m not sure I did get it. As First Novel suggests, it’s never this simple as ‘either’ ‘or’. It’s always ‘or’, ‘or’, ‘or’ . . . For its sheer nerve and invention, First Novel deserves a round of applause. Royle jumps from high buildings and takes the reader with him. Either we land on our feet, or we don’t.